Secondly, I’ve been writing an evaluation report at work. It seemed like a bit of a slog, even though it got written fairly quickly. I think it was just a bit of a struggle because I hadn’t written an evaluation report before, and hadn’t written anything so lengthy for a while. I enjoyed writing it, although I’m quite glad it’s finished…well, it’s finished unless anyone  tells me there are changes they want me to make!

I’ve also been doing more proof reading than usual. I had some articles to proof read for the Somerville Foundation, and around the same time a friend of my mum’s sent some more proof reading me way, in the shape of  the booklet/book she had been writing It  was quite long (17,000 words), but, fortunately, also very interesting!

For leisure purposes, I’ve been reading The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson, which is supposed to be a comic novel, but I found it rather depressing (apart from one sentence and I can’t remember now what that sentence said). I also read Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, one installment of Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small mysteries; a series I’d never heard of before. Not quite sure how I missed it since I’m a fan of mystery stories and interested in Judaism! Although the book feels slightly dated now (it was written and is set in the 1960s) and occasionally displays an interesting lack of political correctness, I enjoyed it overall.

Pattern on the sand, caused by the tide/wave motions (I think)

Anyway, the plot was even more bonkers than I remembered – how could I have forgotten all the dog-related silliness? I almost lost track of who had got mixed-up with who and what their real names were, but such is the nature of farce. The thing about farce is that you have to be able to pull it off well and, thankfully, Canterbury Operatic proved that they can do farce very well indeed. The title of this post just about sums it up, really: Lines were delivered with excellent timing, facial expressions were used to great effect, songs (one in particular!) contained sounds which were possibly some of the most unusual I’ve ever heard – but in a very good way that helped me chortle my way through the show.

The cast gave an immense amount of energy in both the singing (which was excellent, on the whole), and the dancing…I just do not know how they do it! Actually, I do – lots of hard work! It was such a professional, well-executed show. The cast and crew should be very proud of themselves.

If you’re ever in Kent and Canterbury Operatic Society are putting on a show please go and see it!

The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

a person whose physiological functioning is aided by
or dependent upon a mechanical or electronic device.

Dictionary.com**

There are plenty of us out there who fall into this category; people with pacemakers, mechanical valves, artificial legs, eyes, hands, whatever. Some people would argue that even people who wear glasses are cyborgs.  A discussion about someone wearing glasses being a cyborg was actually what started me off thinking about this whole subject of cybernetic humans. Here is a bit of it:

@SimonXIX @ijclark What about people with pacemakers?—
  (@anicecupoftea) February 15, 2013

I don’t know whether people who wear glasses really count as cyborgs, though. Mainly because the glasses are not a part of them in the same way that the pacemaker is part of me – it’s in me and literally intertwined with me. I can never be without it. It’s part of the mechanics of my body in a way that is very different to the interaction between someone and their spectacles. However, I see the flaws in my argument – what about people with removable prosthetic limbs? for one.

The idea of people-technology hybrids as being “more than human” is an intriguing one. Cyborgs are more than human in that we’re humans with ‘add-ons’, as it were, but not usually in the sense that we’re enhanced beyond normal human capabilities. However, we are also not less than human (which was Simon’s point). We usually think of cyborgs in the context of science fiction, where they’re quite often portrayed as the bad guys; and we think of them as being somehow less than human – robots, rather than people enhanced with machinery – so the term ‘cyborg’ can carry quite negative connotations. [I'm not sure whether the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica really count as cyborgs, but there is an excellent and fascinating case in point if they do.] As well as this, some people can get a bit freaked out when thinking about machine-human hybrids. Being part-machine is  not natural, it’s not ‘normal’, and humans tend not to like things or people that don’t fit their ideas about what is natural or normal. Bizarrely, when I went to see the surgeon before my heart surgery in 2008 the thing he said that upset me most was that I might have to have a pacemaker. I still can’t coherently explain why, but I think it was just the idea of having something in me that wasn’t me. It just seemed wrong. But now I know it’s perfectly alright, and being a cyborg has improved my life tremendously!

It seems that the definition of who or what is a cyborg has moved far beyond my personal opinion and what the original definition of the word referred to. If I remember rightly, the conversation on Twitter went on to discuss cyborgs and librarianship. If you’re interested in such things you might want to have a look at Simon’s post on the subject. Further afield, at least one person is arguing that “we’re all cyborgs now”:

What do you think?

_______________

*Although I may be paranoid, this is not to be confused with an android.

** Interestingly, not every dictionary defines “cyborg” in the same way. Some define cyborgs as being fictional or hypothetical, and as someone who is technologically enhanced beyond normal human capabilities. However, if one goes back to the original of cyborg (cybernetic organism) as someone who is part-machine and part-human then cyborgs certainly do exist, although most ‘real’ cyborgs are only enhanced ‘up’ to, rather than beyond, normal human capabilities (if that). Even with my pacemaker I’m not going to win any races! However, I’m pretty sure I exist…

Last weekend, Mr C and I went to the British Museum with my mum. She wanted to go to see the Ice Age Art exhibition, which we did, and very fascinating it was too. I found it quite hard to take in how old the objects were. I hadn’t been to the British Museum at all before, so I was quite excited to go, and I really loved it. Now we know how easy it is to get there we will go again (I hope). I think the Lion Man in the Ice Age Art exhibition was my favourite object of the ones I saw, but I also liked the huge Assyrian lion (and lots of other things). Last night I dreamed that I was holding a large cat. Not as big as a lion, more like the size of our neighbour, Big Cat (AKA Fat Cat).

Terrifying!

Other things I’ve been doing include knitting gloves and waiting for trains. At least we had a nice double rainbow to look at when the trains were delayed on Thursday:

I’ve been practicing using double-pointed needles (dpns) and made another hat. This one also turned out smaller than I expected, but now I’ve realised that I had measured my head wrongly and it is actually much bigger than I thought it was. Haha. So this hat too has gone to a child of my acquaintance. The pattern is Meret, by Woolly Wormhead.

Going to exhibitions

Well, an exhibition. We went to see the Ansel Adams exhibition at the National Maritime Museum last Saturday. It was very good. I didn’t really know anything about Ansel Adams before, other than that he was famous photographer, so it was good to learn more about him as well as seeing lots of his photos of water (unsurprisingly, given the location, the theme of the exhibition is “Photography from the Mountains to the Sea”). Going to the exhibition made me feel a bit better about my own photography. I’ve never been quite sure whether it is OK to edit photos after you’ve taken them, or whether this is really ‘cheating’; but Ansel Adams did this as a matter of course. He would, apparently, spend hours in the darkroom developing lots of different prints of the same picture, changing aspects of it until he was happy with the outcome. Obviously editing pictures in a darkroom takes a lot more skill than doing it on a computer, but Ansel Adams was enthusiastic about the possibilities of using computers in photography – there was a film clip at the exhibition of him talking about it. He didn’t live to see the ‘digital photography revolution’ (he died in 1984), but I think he would have been quite excited by it.

Rose at the National Maritime Museum, November 2011

Avoiding snow

We’ve had snow here again this weekend. While we haven’t had such awful weather as in other parts of the country, it is still annoying. I’m fed up with the cold and the grey and the damp…as I expect most other people in the country are. The daffodils have come up, and are struggling bravely on  - they must be quite hardy as they keep bouncing back, when the snow allows!

Having Mr C’s friend to stay for a week

One of Mr C’s childhood friends from Malaysia has been to stay for a week. He just left this morning. It was good to see him again, and I think Mr C enjoyed catching up with him and another friend from Malaysia who actually lives in London but who he hadn’t seen for a long time. Mr C’s friend was quite intrepid, and braved the railways on his own – with varying degrees of success! He brought some Malaysian food over with him, so I’m looking forward to eating lots of noodles soon…

Noodles!

Watching things grow

Despite the continuing cold weather things are starting to grow and blossom (see e.g. daffodils, above). The orchid has also decided to flower this year, after taking a break from flowering last year, which is nice. I was worried it wouldn’t flower ever again, but I was wrong.

I’m in two minds about photo editing. Sometimes its worth doing, particularly if you need to correct something, but sometimes I feel like I do it for the sake of it, just because I like messing about with pictures and trying out all the effects. It’s fun, but I could probably spend my time more productively.

The park is lovely – I love living near so much green and being able to look out across the river. The town we live in has a bit of a bad reputation; but where we live is pleasant, near to the shops and the station, and we have great neighbours. There’s a nice community feel to our road, because people actually know one-another’s names (not everyone, admittedly), and stop and chat, and we all follow the adventures of the neighbourhood cats, of which there are a few. People help each other out by mowing their neighbours’ front lawns, gritting their paths in winter and lending them things…the neighbourhood is definitely friendlier than it looks in these photos!

The pictures were taken on an HTC Desire C, and edited using Pixlr Express.

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The problem for me, and others like me, is that in society in general, and the workplace in particular, it seems that it’s not acceptable to be negative, even when the negative thing is the true thing. For example, the other week, we were evaluating something at work. We’d had quite a few negative comments from staff, which we wanted to put into the report because we felt it was important people had the chance to have their say about the situation. But one person in our group said we should leave them out because they were too negative. But they were people’s opinions – why should they not be entitled to have their voices heard just because their feedback wasn’t positive? (We put it in the report in the end as the majority of us thought it should go in.)

Anyhow, one of my (two) new year’s resolutions was to try and be more positive, so I have decided to actually do something about this. I usually enjoy reading Oliver Burkeman’s columns in The Guardian weekend magazine, so when I saw he’d written a book called The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, I decided I would read it. Happily, I was able to download it as an e-book from the public library. [I'm still slightly over-excited about the fact that one can borrow e-books from the public library - perhaps I should write a blog post about this and get it out of my system.] I enjoyed the book, and I think it’s worth reading, particularly if the usual run of self-help books just makes you feel worse than you felt to begin with. For starters, the book describes just what a waste of time positive thinking (aka pretending everything is alright when it’s not) can be. Hooray! I felt better already.

I was going to summarise the main points of the book here, but (a) it’s probably better if you read it for yourself, and (b) this post would be too long if I did, so instead I will share the quotations used at the head of each chapter, which are a sort of summary in themselves:

Try to post for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky - Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

- Arnold Bennett, Things  That Have Interested Me

You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.

- Marlo Stanfield in The Wire

Future, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends and true and our happiness is assured.

- Ambrose Pierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself – and there isn’t one.

- Wei Wu Wei, Ask the Awakened

Security is a kind of death, I think.

- Tennessee Williams, ‘The Catastrophe of Success‘

You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a Veal Orloff. But you can do something very good with a sow’s ear.

- Julia Child

If I had my life over I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death…without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

- Inspector Mortimer in Muriel Spark‘s Momento Mori

One of the most helpful ideas I got from the book was the idea of, when worrying about something, to think about what the worst-case scenario could really be. In most situations the worse-case scenario is probably not really going to be as bad as we might think it is, and even if it is bad, it is unlikely to be something that we really can’t cope with in some way. Also, being a brilliant procrastinator, I found the idea of procrastination being a result of  feeling that we can’t do something rather than us really, literally, not being able to do it an interesting one that I hadn’t thought of before. E.g.,  I might feel that  I’m unable to do some Hebrew exercises, but really, I am literally (physically) able to do them, I just don’t feel like it. So, the answer to procrastination is to just get on and do things.

I was also interested to learn that the expression “X  [person] is a failure” and the idea of people being “failures” only came into being during the growth of capitalism in the late 1800s when people started to get credit ratings, and bad credit ratings came to determine a person’s “moral worth” as well as their financial status.  Also, there is a particularly intriguing chapter on the evils of goal setting that should be read by all managers, IMHO.

In general, Burkeman advises embracing such ‘negative’ things as failure and uncertainty, because seeking after success and security are likely to make us more unhappy. None of this is news, but, when you look around at society and at the workplace in particular you would be forgiven for thinking that it was. I suspect that most people secretly (or not so secretly) know that trying to be perfect is going to do us harm, that setting goals is not the way to get the best out of people, that it’s OK to fail, and that we need to think about death a bit more (in a good way), but ‘society’ and the way we’ve been taught to live tell us the opposite. We spend a lot of time deluding ourselves, in various ways, about a myriad of things, when, actually, if we could just see and accept reality we might just be a bit happier.